Russia and China Sign Cooperation Pacts

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President Xi Jinping of China met with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on Friday, a day before the 70th anniversary celebration of Victory Day in Moscow.Published OnMay 8, 2015CreditImage by Alexander Zemlianichenko/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

MOSCOW — On the eve of a celebration commemorating to the defeat of Nazi Germany, the presidents of Russia and China on Friday signed 32 bilateral agreements designed to highlight the warming of relations between the countries even as Russia’s have soured with the West.

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and President Xi Jinping of China presided over a signing ceremony that included a road map to balancing their regional interests in Central Asia, secured more than $6 billion in Chinese investment in a Russian intercity rail line and established an information security agreement heralded as a “nonaggression pact” between the countries in cyberspace.

Yet amid the warm words and declarations of shared intent from the two leaders, there were also signs of tense, behind-the-scenes negotiations. Notably absent from the agreements signed Friday was a compromise on a price for gas to be sold by Russia to China through a new, multibillion-dollar pipeline from the fields of Western Siberia to the Chinese border.

Particularly since the imposition of Western sanctions over Russia’s military actions in Ukraine, Russian patriotic politicians and state television have promoted China as a country that, unlike Europe, can provide access to investment and markets but also shares Russia’s values and recognizes its regional interests.

“The results are O.K. if measured against reality and not the propaganda,” Alexander Gabuev, chairman of the Russia program at the Asia-Pacific Program at the Carnegie Moscow Center, said of the talks. “The Russians have finally understood that China will invest only if it sees benefits.”

Mr. Xi was met in the capital with a charm offensive that included live, wall-to-wall coverage of his arrival and the talks on state television. More than 100 Chinese soldiers are set to march in an enormous military parade this Saturday, and Chinese and Russian warships are participating in joint exercises in the Black Sea next week.

In public remarks, Mr. Putin said China and the Soviet Union had borne the greatest human cost in World War II.

“Now we are as a result standing against any attempts to rehabilitate Nazism and militarism, against the falsification of history,” Mr. Putin said, referring to Imperial Japan as well as Germany. Mr. Xi invited Mr. Putin to a victory celebration in September, which Mr. Putin said he would attend.

Aleksei B. Miller, the head of Gazprom, called the results of Friday’s talks, including the decision on where the pipeline would enter China, “a factual part of a future contract.”

Aleksandr Kornilov, an oil and gas analyst at Alfa Bank, said that Gazprom was far from any agreement because of falling oil prices and because Turkmenistan, a gas-rich Central Asia nation, can also supply cheap gas to China.

“The price itself has always been a stumbling point for these talks with China,” Mr. Kornilov said. “The bargaining power of Gazprom here is lower.”

In other spheres, the talks produced fruits for Russia’s tighter relationship with China. The two appeared to find a framework to avoid a clash between China’s Silk Road investment program and Russia’s Eurasian Economic Union. The Chinese promised to invest billions in a railway between the cities of Moscow and Kazan. An agreement was also struck on a $2 billion agricultural investment fund, and a nearly $1 billion line of credit for Russia’s Sberbank.

Building on previous agreements, the two countries also signed a memorandum not to launch hacking attacks against each other and condemned efforts to destabilize internal politics via the Internet.

Alexander Salnikov, a deputy director of the Moscow-based Institute of Information Security, said that “perhaps 70 percent” had been borrowed from a previous agreement under the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, but added that language protecting internal sovereignty in cyberspace was novel.

Andrei Soldatov, an information security expert and author of a scheduled book on Russian Internet surveillance, played down the agreement, saying it was directed mainly to “send a signal to the U.S.”

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